The Fry Chronicles (28 page)

I emerged from university a thin, tall, outwardly confident graduate for whom everything seemed new and exciting, if wildly temporary. Sooner or later, I
was convinced, I would be found out, and the doors of showbusiness would be slammed in my face, and I should have to set about answering my true vocation as a teacher of some kind. In the meantime I could not deny that it was larky and lovely to be riding this transitory cloud of glory.

The Perrier Award resulted in a London run of our Footlights show. Well, let us not overstate the case. ‘London run’ suggests something rather grand: in fact we played as the late-night afterthought in a converted morgue in Hampstead called the New End, postal codes away from the fizzing neon of Shaftesbury Avenue. Not that we were complaining. The New End was to us as exciting as the West End. This small theatre had made its journey from abandoned hospital mortuary to leading fringe venue seven years earlier under the auspices of the excellent and pioneering Buddy Dalton and was as glamorous in our eyes as the London Palladium or the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

The Cellar Tapes
followed every night for a week the main evening show, Steven Berkoff’s
Decadence
, which starred Linda Marlowe and of course the brilliant and terrifying actor/author himself. The impossible delight of knowing that Berkoff snuck into our dressing-rooms and stole our cigarettes was almost as thrilling as watching him scrawl ‘cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt’ all over Nicholas de Jong’s
Evening Standard
review of his play and pin it defiantly to the wall in the theatre lobby. Berkoff had a hard, restless menace that he was to bring to the wider world’s attention two years later when he played Victor Maitland, the cruel
coke- and art-dealing villain of
Beverly Hills Cop
. Given his fearsome reputation it is something of a miracle that such a parcel of poncey Cambridge wags as us got away without verbal, at the very least, assault, but despite his manner Berkoff’s first loyalty is to the theatre and to actors. Even freshly graduated revue artists in tweed jackets are admitted to the pantheon. His ire, aggression and insult are reserved for critics, producers and executives.

After the New End came Australia. In honour of Ian Botham’s epic summer of genius we gave our revue the title
Botham, the Musical
. It is not often that there is enough British salt or a big enough Australian wound for the one to be rubbed into the other, so it seemed like an appropriate and attention-grabbing name for the show.

Australia in the early eighties was a revelation to me. I had expected a backwater: yellow-cellophaned shop windows displaying orange tank-tops and ten-year-old transistor radios, drunken homophobic, pommy-bashing Ockers, winged-glasses-wearing Edna Everages and a sour atmosphere of cultural cringe, inferiority-complex rodomontade and tall-poppy resentment. Not even the greatest Australophile could deny that those elements did and still do exist, but they were and are by no means predominant. I found Australia to be a country of matchlessly high-quality and low-cost food and wine and vibrating with an optimistic prosperity that contrasted vividly with Britain’s miseries of recession, rioting and IRA bombings. The affluence and confidence astonished me. The bright outdoorsy climate seemed to be echoed in the national mood just as Britain’s grey, chilly pessimism so perfectly matched its relentlessly unappetizing weather. I could not know that Britain’s mood was set to change.

Botham, the Musical
opened in Perth, and we worked our way across the continent, spending most of our earnings in restaurants. I learnt in Australia to love crayfish and oysters: oysters raw, oysters Rockefeller, oysters Kilpatrick and oysters Casino. At Doyle’s seafood restaurant, which I still visit whenever I am in Sydney, I discovered barramundi and those strange lobster-like creatures the Moreton Bay and Balmain Bugs. This was also the first time I had ever seen wine sold varietally, where the bottles displayed the name of the grape variety, rather than the château, estate or domain of origin. This is so accepted now as to be unworthy of notice. Only the Old World clings to its Barolo, Bordeaux and Mosel labellings – everywhere else you know from one glance at the bottle that the wine is made of Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Tempranillo or Riesling. Having said which, thirty years later it is clear that easy familiarity with varieties has not entirely penetrated Britain. I saw an edition of
The Weakest Link
not so long ago where, to the question ‘What are Merlot, Shiraz and Chardonnay?’, the contestant offered the answer ‘Footballers’ wives?’

Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane, Hobart, Launceston, Burnie and Albury Wodonga were all ticked off the itinerary before it was time to return to a snowy December England. We broke the journey in Singapore, staying for two nights at Raffles Hotel, where we ran out of money.

I am back in London. I ride on the Underground and grip the chromium rail to steady myself. The contrast
between my brown hand and the paper-white English ones alongside astonishes me. I am in the Tube travelling to Notting Hill. I am on my way to a meeting at a flat in Pembridge Place that will change my life.

For the most part Australia had seemed to take to our comedy. We were just a band of students playing in smallish venues, and it was neither overwhelming triumph nor humiliating disaster. We were presenting material that was now nearly a year old: the Dracula monologue, the Shakespeare Masterclass, the Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett sketch, songs, sketches and quickies that we knew backwards. I remember Martin telling us that we would still be doing them in ten years’ time. I blush to reveal that I performed Dracula for a charity show in Winchester just three months ago, a full twenty-nine years after I wrote it. But if, and it was an if as wide as the distance between Sydney and London, we were to make a professional go of comedy, it would mean writing new material, it would mean attempting to make a mark in a new comedy world.

With Emma in ‘My Darling’ – a Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning sketch.

In 1981 a great schism had apparently started to open up in the jolly world of humorous entertainment. I cannot recall when I first heard the phrase ‘alternative comedy’ but I do clearly remember seeing Alexei Sayle on television during my last year at Cambridge. Reeling and jerking like a puppet, crammed à la Tommy Cooper into a double-breasted suit a size too small, sucking in breath through his teeth, Sayle raged brilliantly about posey middle-class liberals. I subsequently learnt that his best lines were actually from the resolutely middle-class privately educated lawyer and Cambridge Footlights alumnus Clive Anderson, but that is not to take away
the impact Sayle had. The tireless and surreal rants, all spat out in a Liverpudlian accent you could grate cheese with, combined with the look of a swarthy silent-movie villain made him funny, frightening and impossible to ignore, a kind of anarcho-syndicalist John Belushi – but Lithuanian, Jewish and rebarbative where Belushi was Albanian, Orthodox and cuddly. When I first met him I was made acutely aware that I represented everything he most despised: public school, Cambridge and, due to that manner that I have never been able to shake off, Establishment. Prejudice and snobbery appear to be considered legitimate in that direction: if I had despised him for being the working-class, state-school son of a communist railway worker, I should have been rightly condemned. In those days you were proud of being working-class and ashamed of being middle-class. I was desperate to be proud of being no class, of being
déclassé
and
déraciné
, of being bohemian-class, eternal-student-class, artist-class. I missed all those by a mile and continue to this day to reek more of the Garrick Club than the Groucho Club, but that has never stopped me trying, in my doomed, futile and pointless way, to be free. We all have our strange ways of coping, or failing to cope. Over the years I got on perfectly politely and almost amiably with Alexei and his wife, Linda, but I am afraid I have never really forgiven him for his bullying unkindness and aggression towards Ben Elton. By the end of the decade and throughout the nineties he missed no opportunity to take pot-shots at Ben, unjustly accusing him of being somehow inauthentic, derivative and abjectly unworthy of the label comedian or alternative. Well, all that came later, and I dare say he has calmed down now: the point
is that, for a short few years, Sayle stood out as the most visible symbol of this new movement and at the time of our return from Australia the world appeared to belong to him and his cohorts.

I am not by nature a pessimist but I did wonder if the door had closed on types like us. Comedy is, as everyone knows, all about timing, and I feared that in the career sense our comic timing was way off.
Not the Nine O’Clock News
, with three Oxbridge performers, its ex-Footlights producer John Lloyd and its Oxford chief writer Richard Curtis was surely the last hurrah of our kind. And good riddance, the world was saying. What punk had done for music the alternative comedians were doing for comedy. The classic ‘Ah Perkins, come in, sit down’ comic sketch would be swept away along with the tuck box and the old school tie. This is how it seemed to us in our darker moments. I am now fully aware of a fact that will be obvious to you but of which back then I was only dimly conscious, so easy it is to believe that events, history and circumstances conspire uniquely against one. While we may have feared what we feared you can be sure that squadrons of comedians waiting in the wings had quite contrary anxieties. They looked at a BBC dominated by Oxbridge graduates who all appeared to read the same books and newspapers, talk the same way, refer to the same arcane experiences and share the same tastes. There was no Channel 4 at this point, no cable, no satellite, just BBC1, BBC2, BBC radio. A single ITV channel offered variety shows and the last heroes of the great musical-hall tradition in comedians like Benny Hill, Morecambe and Wise and Tommy Cooper as well as sitcoms that, with the glorious exception of
Rising Damp
, were unmemorable,
unoriginal and uninspiring. If you were from neither an Oxbridge nor a variety background I can quite see how Fortress Broadcasting must have appeared unassailable. From such a point of view Emma, Hugh and I would have looked like pampered noblesse for whom the portcullis was respectfully raised, the banner hoisted and fires lit in the great hall. It is perhaps unseemly to emphasize how far from true we felt this to be, but unseemly emphasis is pardonable. Indeed, at just this time, Margaret Thatcher was making unseemly emphasis her signature oratorical mode, and the decade itself prepared for cheekbones, big hair, shoulder pads, political division and conspicuous consumption all to be emphasized in as unseemly a manner as could be managed. Unseemly emphasis was in the air and nowhere more so than in the comedians muttering and massing outside the castle gates.

Peter Rosengard, a life insurance salesman with a penchant for cigars and Claridge’s breakfasts, had visited the Comedy Store in America and in 1979, together with Don Ward, a comic who specialised in warming up rock and roll crowds, he had launched the London Comedy Store, a small room above a topless bar in Walker’s Court, Soho. Already by 1981 the Comedy Store had come to stand for this whole
nouvelle vague
in comedy – a movement that coincided with the sharp style of the listings magazine
Time Out
and its achingly leftist breakaway rival
City Limits
, a movement that tapped the discontent and desire for difference of a student generation emerging into a recession-hit, Tory-controlled, anxious and angry Britain. Squadrons of young middle-class revolutionaries wore out the grooves of
London Calling
, talked the talk of gender politics and walked the walk of CND and Rock
Against Racism. It is not to be wondered that they were unsatisfied with the comedy of
Are You Being Served?
,
The Russ Abbott Madhouse
and
Never the Twain
.

The house of entertainment was comprised of two families: the traditional, to which Dick Emery, Mike Yarwood, the Two Ronnies, Bruce Forsyth and the above-mentioned immortals Morecambe and Wise, Benny Hill and Tommy Cooper belonged, and the graduate, that dynasty started by Peter Cook, which swelled to its full greatness under Monty Python and was now coming to a full stop, or so we feared, with the
Not
team of John Lloyd, Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, Oxbridgers all. Was the new comedy represented by Alexei Sayle, Ben Elton, French and Saunders, Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson, Keith Allen and the many others bubbling under an alternative to the first family or to the second? Well, more to the second in fact, despite the background chatter of the times which made out that it was all a class war. Alexei Sayle went to Chelsea Art College and was the most Pythonesque of all the comedians with his streams of absurdist surreality and deliberately recondite frames of reference. French and Saunders met at drama school. Elton, Edmondson and Mayall had all been students at Manchester University together. The truth is that very few of the first wave of alternative comedians could claim to have got their education from the streets or the school of hard knocks; in fact as an old lag
I
might be said to be the most real and hard of any of them, a thought preposterous enough to show that the idea of there being a group of working-class comics threatening Castle Poncey was really quite misguided. All the comedians were from the same mix of
backgrounds as ever, and there was plenty of old-school silly sketch comedy among the angry edgy stand-up. It is true that there was an alternative
audience
who were ready for something different, and their demand for the new might be said to have released the energy that was now being called ‘alternative’. Some years later Barry Cryer gave the best definition of alternative comedians I have yet to hear. ‘They’re the same only they don’t play golf.’